RAMHM Chapter 159

Deep, and Deeper Still

Rhodness—without Adrienne noticing—swallowed back a curse.

Adrienne handled him like a seasoned torturer.

He pressed down on his own hips—rising without his permission—and gripped the sheets, clutching them the way a drowning man clutches the last solid thing, trying to hold what remained of his reason.

He wanted to pull her against him until neither of them could breathe, wanted to move however he wanted, and the wanting was close to madness.

The skin where they touched was soft in a way that gave and gave, like sinking into something warm that had no bottom, and the breath between them was sweet enough to make his head spin.

The slow current of their breathing had grown hot and taut, coiling tighter.

And then Adrienne—still matching him, still answering—began her conquest.

Something snapped somewhere inside Rhodness's skull, and he had to clench his teeth to keep the sound from escaping.

'This... damn...'

This was the limit.

The small chin that had been pressed to his mouth turned, gradually, toward the ceiling.

His field of vision brightened. The painted ceiling he should have seen wasn't there. Everything went white.

He ground his teeth, crushed the sound forming in his throat, and—his arms being free so long as they weren't holding Adrienne—lifted one and covered both eyes.

Breath fell against his skin from all directions, and he couldn't have said whose it was.

Rhodness lowered his arm, exposing a face gone crimson.

He found Adrienne's eyes—flushed at the corners, breath coming in short pulls.

Her slender hand seized his shoulder with a force that suggested she intended to break it.

With every increase in the pressure of her grip, his reason made another round trip to the far edge of the sky and back.

"...Adrienne."

His voice—thoroughly wrecked—cut through the heated air. Adrienne sealed it with her mouth.

Now truly, the limit.

Crack.

Something shattered in the empty air.

Before I could even get out a scream—just an "ah—" cut short—it was already happening.

My body tilted, and then the bed was beneath me.

I blinked, and there was the elaborate ceiling.

The magic that had bound him—it had shattered!

The reversal of their positions was instantaneous.

Rhodness's face—reason entirely gone from it—was above me, looking as though it intended to swallow me whole.

"Let go! I wasn't finished!"

"...I'm just starting."

The heat of him, undiminished, settled over me and pressed down—slow, heavy, total.

That heat I could never get used to split straight through every sense of mine, without mercy.

"Mm...nh..."

The sound a barely a syllable, pressed against my lips before it could become anything more. My eyes welled with tears from the sheer weight of the pressure.

My breath stopped entirely, and in an instant my vision went dark as an extinguished flame, then lit again.

Rhodness pulled me flush against him and scattered rough breath across the back of my neck.

The tingling that ran the length of my spine left me no choice but to hold on—to him, who was pressing deeper into me.

He bit down gently on my earlobe, dragged his tongue upward, and then brought his lips to mine with more sweetness than I had any right to expect.

His mouth was tender. What moved inside it was not.

Every surface it found, it worked without restraint.

I threw my arms around his back—which had begun to move with force—like a rope caught at the edge of a cliff.

My fingernails curled into his back before I decided to. It must have hurt considerably, but Rhodness didn't flinch. He absorbed it.

A single movement I felt between my hands sent my awareness flying somewhere very far away and back in one trip.

The sensation of being shoved off a cliff, then suspended floating in open air, hit me without pause.

My mind went white, then flooded red, then went black, then turned gold, then started again.

Rhodness didn't offer me so much as a low laugh as I labored through half-sobs for breath.

He only poured his own exhale into the spaces between each soft press of his mouth.

As though he were permitting me only what he gave.

He pressed his breath into me without stopping. As if there were no other option I had.

There was no gap for outside air to enter.

I was wrapped in heat I couldn't breathe past, and I had no choice but to take in each breath he gave me.

Like a beast released from restraint reaching for the fawn thrown before it, his red eyes burned black—all reason gone from them.

Goosebumps rose on my arms where they gripped him. My toes curled. I was half-sobbing, but I laughed, drunk on every sensation he gave me.

"I waited only for this moment. Only this."

His voice came out frayed, bitten through. The jaw where it came from didn't ease—the muscle there worked without releasing, holding something back while he moved exactly as he wanted.

A single narrow drop of sweat traced his jawline and fell, landing on my collarbone.

The sharp, electric sensation that ran my spine. The heat that sent reason so far away it could only return as scattered exhales.

"I love you, Adrienne."

Nothing was more overwhelming than this damp voice—eyes reddened at the corners, nothing in the face left but instinct—whispering love without stopping.

"I love you."

On those words he clenched his teeth. The candlelight made his platinum hair move and scatter in every direction.

A star.

A star that lit the dark night and simultaneously sent my awareness further away.

I felt as though I had plunged into that dark and brilliant lake of stars I'd seen from Starlight Hill.

If the Rhodness of that night had been like an angel, the Rhodness of now was something that ruled this darkening, damp air—something out of a fever-dream.

"Rhoan, Rhoan..."

He seemed to know what I was going to say. His lips—briefly withdrawn—came back down, rough and immediate.

Everything went distant. Something seized my mind and ran the length of my spine and spread through every nerve.

My body floated, and floated, and floated again, until it was drawn down into a darkness too far away to name.

In that hot, sweet black space, the more I moved through it—

Deeper. Deeper still.

—I felt as though I had become a star, burning all the way down.

"Word is that His Imperial Highness has been completely ignoring his duties and refusing to leave the bridal chamber—have you heard, Your Highness? It's been nearly two months since the wedding and the sweet rumors just keep coming."

"Lady Nora! That's terribly improper!"

"Irene, this isn't improper—it's coaxing her to brag about her husband a little. Take notes."

They had gathered around the tea table for the first time in quite a while.

As Nora said, rumors about the Crown Prince and his new bride—who had slipped away before the wedding celebration had even properly ended—had already spread across the empire.

There had been nothing like it from the previous Crown Prince and his wife, which made it all the sweeter for those who had long been thirsty for good news from the imperial house.

Recently, what had everyone talking was an anonymous letter to the Imperial Gazette under the heading The Two Faces of Crown Prince Bardenaldo—a lengthy piece exposing the late Crown Prince's cunning and duplicity. His reputation, already in freefall following the scandal of the double marriage register, hit the ground completely after the piece ran.

Which made the news from the new Crown Prince couple all the more welcome—the empire's own light and salt, as the papers liked to put it. They were a couple who could make headlines with a single sneeze.

Adrienne reached for her water the moment Nora brought up the bridal chamber and drank quickly.

Rhodness lately was—there was no other word for it—insane in his persistence.

She had been doing her best, in accordance with Bianca's instruction, to hold her own against the man who was now her husband. Every time Rhodness stepped out briefly for external business, she called for Rotsy and practiced stronger binding magic. The spells broke every night, reduced to nothing, but they were getting stronger.

The problem was that the breaking of them seemed to work as a fresh provocation, turning him more feral each time.

It had only been recently that she had begun accepting audiences and taking on new duties. As the rumors went, there had been a stretch where the two of them barely left the bed—eating, then each other, then eating again, then each other, until Adrienne fell asleep from sheer exhaustion, at which point Rhodness would pull whatever necessary paperwork into the bridal chamber and deal with it there.

He had since departed for the northwestern territories where monsters had appeared, which was why she was only now recovering something resembling a normal life.

She pressed the flush from her face with both hands and answered with as much composure as she could manage.

"Rumors always tend toward exaggeration. We're no different from any ordinary newlywed couple. The teasing is welcome, but I'd rather the more colorful speculation not find its way beyond the palace walls, my lady."

"Of course, Your Highness! What we say here stays here. Like this."

Nora pressed her lips shut tight and stretched her neck out, exaggerated and smug.

The image was so absurd that Adrienne exhaled something almost a laugh, and Nora, relieved, laughed along.

And then there was the one person in the room watching them both with eyes that hadn't fully opened.

"...Does Rhodness torment you?"

Bliea's voice came out low and ominous.

Adrienne's stomach turned for reasons she would not examine, and she pushed aside the dessert she had been eating. Bliea's eyes, which had been tracking every detail, sharpened.

The warmth that had been building at the tea table evaporated.

"What do you mean by that, Bliea?"

Adrienne asked with due courtesy. Bliea's expression curdled.

"We're among ourselves. Don't be careful around me. Something's off."

Adrienne did not want to think any further about Rhodness while he wasn't here. She shut her eyes briefly against the dizziness and opened them.

Bliea watched Adrienne's expression with focused attention, then pointed at the plate she'd pushed away.

"That's the pudding you like. Olivia's own milk pudding. After the wedding you looked like you'd filled out a bit, but lately you've gone thin again. What is it—something you can't say?"

What Adrienne wanted to say was: when you're married to a man with that much energy, there's nothing to be done, so please stop asking. She bit down on it.

Bliea showed no intention of stopping.

"You've lost your appetite, haven't you. People always lose their appetite first when something's wrong. Adrienne, don't hide it—tell me. It's not too late to undo the marriage. Is he tormenting you?"

"No, he's not, so please—"

Adrienne reached under the tea table and gripped Bliea's knee hard.

She sent the clearest possible signal with her eyes. Stop.

Bliea, somehow, misread it entirely.

'She can't say it in front of the maids. This is definitely a secret she can't share in company.'

It was not.

But Bliea had already turned to Nora and Irene and asked them to excuse themselves.

Irene withdrew with a face full of worry. Nora withdrew with the quiet thought that Lady Bliea is barking up the wrong tree again.

"Now tell me."

"Tell you what? Stop this, Bliea. There's nothing wrong between us. When he torments me, it's not like—it's not that kind of thing."

"Oh? So he does torment you in some way?"

"Why are you doing this—you know what I mean!"

"How would I know if you won't tell me!"

Bianca and Rotsy, who had not left, were suppressing laughter with visible effort as they watched the sisters argue.

"If you're so confident, prove to me you haven't lost your appetite! People push food away for a reason! You pushed away the thing you like most while we were talking about your husband!"

Bliea lifted the plate and waved it directly in front of Adrienne's face. The milk pudding Adrienne usually loved teetered dangerously. And then—

"Ugh—take it away —"

Adrienne gagged.

Bliea, still holding the plate in front of Adrienne's nose, went still as stone.

"Adrienne?"

"I told you to take it away! I just have an unsettled stomach, that's all!"

Does a simple loss of appetite normally produce retching?

The color drained from Bliea's face, little by little. As Adrienne pressed her hand over her mouth and the retching grew more insistent, a memory Bliea would have preferred never to revisit slammed into her.

The image of Adrienne as Grand Duchess, coughing blood into a handkerchief, rose vivid and complete.

When Bianca quickly moved to Adrienne's side with lukewarm water and wrapped an arm around her shoulders, Bliea's mind went entirely white. A shrill voice tore out of her.

"D—Doctor!"

She was on her feet. She grabbed a nearby attendant by the collar and shook.

"Get a doctor! Right now!"

That afternoon.

Applause broke out from the Crown Princess's palace.

The Crown Princess, not yet two months married, was with child.